Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds by Peter Adam Salomon

Author:Peter Adam Salomon [Salomon, Peter Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PseudoPsalms Press
Published: 2019-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

L blinked.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“Please repeat your request.”

“Those five stasis units you told me about, where are they?”

“One is in the Infirmary.”

“The other four?”

“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

L threw the empty injector into the wall where it bounced off without damage.

“Alert me at nineteen hours,” she said.

“Nineteen hours and counting.”

L stood next to M's stasis pod and inserted a food pouch. Her notebook sat on the tray beside a neat row of vials but she’d nothing new to write. No need to try remembering anything. The real mystery was here, now. Four more pods. With their potential DNA waiting.

She changed her mind, grabbing the notebook. The highest level contained their residences, everything else accessed through corridors and ladders, with some doors locked behind panels requesting more DNA.

Down one level to B, more empty rooms, one full of useless tents, several of the largest of them an interconnected massive server farm, plus the vault of yellow vials. She’d explored to level F without finding anything. How many levels to explore? How long before she’d need to return to die?

“Are there any other infirmaries?”

“Level I, Vault 0218 is a designated triage unit with basic medical equipment.”

“Does it have a medpod?”

“Affirmative.”

She descended all the way to I, ignoring the chance to explore the levels she passed in order to get her supplies safely stored in the other infirmary. Safer than exploring first and running out of time if she discovered a problem with the pod. The door opened, the light flickering on. Exact same setup as upstairs, two medpods attached to the floor.

“Everything work in here?”

“Running diagnostics now.”

L lined the yellow vials on a shelf. Food coloring, that’s all. No reason not to make it purple. She liked purple better.

“Medpods online, functioning at 100%.”

“Time?”

“Four hours, fifteen minutes.”

L climbed to G, before walking the corridor opening doors into one empty room after another. H, rooms filled with useless furniture, boxes of assembly-required cribs and thousands of vacuum-packed mattresses rolled up and stacked to the ceiling. Hundreds of empty rooms. I, where the infirmary waited for her.

Level I, Vault 001, read the plaque where the corridor ended. She stood in front of the door until it opened.

The light came on, illuminating a bed, chair, desk, and table. No sheets on the bed, no clothes in the dresser, nothing in the closet.

Level I, Vault 002. Another room, like a hotel, room after room, prepared for guests she knew would never arrive. More empty rooms. More storage rooms. Rooms with chairs. Desks. Dressers. Computer monitors. Massive amounts of supplies filling each one. It wasn’t DNA, but it was more interesting than the emptiness of the majority of the rooms upstairs.

Passing the infirmary, she continued on through the rest of I. More storage. An entire room filled with nothing but the small white notebooks they’d used for taking notes. Another with the pens they’d used. Fifteen with spare medpods far too small to replace the ones in the Infirmaries.

L descended to J. Stood in front of the first door.

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